Steven Rattner Quotes

During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on 'unearned income' have bounced up and down with regularity, and I've never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists.

To be sure, India has achieved enviable success in business services, like the glistening call centers in Bangalore and elsewhere. But in the global jousting for manufacturing jobs, India does not get its share.

It's time for the sensible center to rise up and push for a rational approach to our fiscal challenges.

India's rigid social structure limits intergenerational economic mobility and fosters acceptance of vast wealth disparities.

The highest-income Americans don't need tax-free health insurance, mortgage interest deductions or deferred taxation on retirement funds.

Picking winners among the many young companies seeking money is a tough business, even for the most sophisticated investors. Indeed, most professionally run venture funds lose money. For individuals, it's pure folly. Buy a lottery ticket instead. Your chance of winning is likely to be higher.

The weak economy, widening income inequality, gridlock in Congress and a presidential election: Those were perhaps the dominant economic and political themes of 2012.

Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else.

Most troublesome is the legalization of 'crowd funding,' the ability of start-up companies to raise capital from small investors on the Internet.

The largest number of jobs likely to be created by the JOBS Act will be for lawyers needed to clean up the mess that it will create.

Conservatives brayed that government should stay out of the private sector; liberals bleated for nationalizing the banks.

Visits to crowded Indian urban centers unleash sensory assaults: colorful dress and lilting chatter provide a backdrop to every manner of commerce, from small shops to peddlers to beggars.

From the Left comes the proposition that, given the slow economy, we should defer attending to the problem of mounting obligations - and the truly delusional idea that growing federal debt doesn't matter because we owe most of it to ourselves.

Not surprisingly, troubled economic times often beget proselytizers of wacky, extreme ideas.

China has lunged into the 21st century, while India is still lurching toward it.

Thanks to decades of accumulated federal budget deficits and, more significantly, imprudent Medicare and Social Security policies, we've stolen almost $60 trillion from our children.

Increased revenues, meaning higher taxes, will be a central element of any successful long-term budget plan, and President Obama is right to insist that the wealthy - the slice of America that has come through the recession in by far the best financial health - should provide those funds.